Music and people hold my life together. I describe experiences, discoveries and insights, often connected with music and with teaching and playing piano. The blog is a way to stay in touch with friends, and may also be food for thought for anyone else, especially people connected with music and the piano/
Musik und Menschen halten mein Leben zusammen. Ich beschreibe Erfahrungen, Entdeckungen und Einsichten, oft in Zusammenhang mit dem Klavierspiel und dem Klavierunterricht.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

I certainly didn’t have any premonitions when I put my “Let it snow” mug on the breakfast table a couple of days ago. The weather was beautiful, and it was astonishing to see most of the leaves were still on the trees at the end of October.

On Friday, the weather forecast predicted a drastic drop of temperatures for the next day, and the possibility of snow. Saturday morning talk was about 2-4 inches of snow, and when I looked out the window, the snowflakes had begun to fall. Leaves, flowers and the snow don’t usually met each other.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

A couple of things had gotten on the back burner after the summer, when the children returned for lessons - those things you don’t necessarily notice by yourself, if you don’t have that much experience: putting the chair at the right height, posture, hand position...”Dynamics,” I thought at the first performance class on Sunday, “ everything sounds absolutely flat.”

My piano has a full and rich sound, and even I find it fairly hard to coax it into a pianissimo. Regardless of that, you can hear whether someone is making the attempt, and some students didn’t seem to be doing even that - interestingly, they were the students who played more advanced repertoire.

Of course, as compositions get more complex, everything gets more difficult. There are some many “layers” : coordination, tempo, keeping a steady pace, phrasing and articulation. There are even different aspects of dynamics: you have to balance the hands, and at the same time, you still have to shape each part individually. One hand leads the melody to a peak, while the other hand remains hushed in the background.

“But I got the right notes, and it’s up to tempo,” is a protest I frequently get to hear at lessons. “YOU-DON’T-TALK-TO-ME-LIKE-THIS,” is my standard answer, in a straight ‘robot’ voice, without any expression. Everybody seems to think that, when you’ve “got the notes,” you already have something in the bank. Sometimes it happens to me, too, especially when I’m learning a very difficult piece. Once I’ve managed to figure out the first page, or play one passage up to tempo, I’m so proud of myself that I don’t notice that I’ve lost touch with the sound. I’m hearing what I’d like to hear, but I’m not listening to my playing. The truth is, you can’t play a note whose sound doesn’t have a quality: louder or softer, sharper or more mellow. The question is whether you try to control that quality, or whether you leave it up to chance.

In fact, taking that step out of yourself and really hearing what you are playing is one of the most challenging tasks for the musician. Ultimately, it only works if you hear the sound in your mind before you play it, and your body knows automatically what to do - just as it does when you are speaking. Often, it takes the help of a recording, or “borrowing someone else’s ears” in order to get out of ourselves.

We had talked about all this at lessons, again and again. The question is: how do you get the students to actually do it? I decided that the two of them were going to have a “dynamics” competition, right there and then, and the two younger students would be the judges. We picked one passage from each piece, and the competition began.

First attempt: everything still sounded flat. It turned out you had to really exaggerate to make the judges happy. Second attempt: everything fell apart. Suddenly, there were countless wrong notes in passages that had run smoothly before. When you shape a passage dynamically, it feels different, and if your body isn’t used to the feeling, it gets confused and makes mistakes. After a couple of attempts, things improved, and another challenge appeared. Getting louder and getting softer happens gradually, and it always happens later than you expect. You see the instruction: crescendo, and on impulse, you play louder immediately, only to find yourself peaking early, or ending up with no sound at all, if it’s a diminuendo. “Crescendo means “play softer,” and diminuendo means “play louder,” as Seymour Bernstein likes to put it.

“We’ve got a tie,” the judges finally stated on Sunday, and the two winners shared the first prize: a hug from their teacher. I hope they all go home practicing the correct notes with dynamics, and articulation, and phrasing, and hand balance... What a challenge to keep all that in mind, it seems - it is, and it isn’t. Ultimately, it’s not that complicated. All these different aspects come together in on thing: sound. Playing is not about “thinking” about expression, or “remembering” to breathe. It’s about hearing it, feeling it, and teaching your body to do what you feel.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

“Every piece of music tells a story,” says Mrs Sivan, the Russian piano teacher in Anna Goldsworthy’s memoir “Piano Lessons.” Does it really? Music is the language of emotions. The nuances are much more subtle than anything you could ever put into words. Even poetry hardly comes close.

In teaching, it is quite a common practice to use stories in order to illustrate the emotional content of the music. I just did it at a lesson last week, when my student was playing nothing but “the notes” of her sonatina. First subject: “You wake up and stretch, it’s a beautiful day, and it’s the day when you’re moving into a beautiful new house. 2nd subject: “You get on the way, enjoy the ride, and at the end, you arrive at the house.” I left it up to her to come up with something for the development and the recapitulation. She asked me to make a suggestion: “Maybe you can’t find the keys, and you have to find a way to get in.” “What about this?” she asked, and pointed to the spot where there’s an unexpected turn to minor in the recapitulation. Actually, that was the moment where I knew she had understood the message. “Maybe there’s a ghost in the house.” “And the end?” “Well, I guess the ghost is a good spirit.”

Does music really tell a story? In Goldsworthy’s book, 9-year old Anna makes up a story to go with the slow movement of a Mozart Sonata. The story is completely “off the wall”; “even I didn’t believe it,” the author writes.

Music has the power to speak directly to the emotions, no matter how we feel at the moment when we hear it. It can miraculously process, and even change emotions, but depending on our current state of mind, we can’t always connect to it when we hear it or when we play it. That’s the moment where images, stories, can build the bridge.

Of course, there are numerous pieces of music that illustrate stories, landscapes, pictures, situations. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures of an Exhibition” is playing on the radio. Mussorgsky wrote the music under the impression of his friend’s death, the painter Victor Hartmann. I saw an edition once that had prints of the pictures, and it makes you wonder how these paintings, some of them only sketches, could inspire music whose power and intensity exceeds them by far. The pictures inspired the composer, and the music expresses the emotions they stirred up in him, as he was grieving over his lost friend.

Music that explicitly follows a program expresses emotions, and so does “absolute music”, like Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. Stories and images can help to make the connection, but they can also distract - and that's when it becomes questionable in teaching and performing. The story, the image, becomes an end in itself, starts to lead a life of its own, and distracts from the sound.

“My child, we must work,” says Mrs Sivan after Anna presents her story, that missed the point. Mrs Sivan often uses images and stories in her teaching. Her creative and humorous analogies are delightful: “You must find emotional response to your dynamic. Pianissimo can mean lullaby, or it can means enormous tragedy, you have lost your voice...And of course, pianissimo for elephant is still fortissimo for rabbit.” Yet, everything she says is always directed towards the object of the musician’s task: shaping the sound and “becoming the music,” - the sound and the music that comes from within.

Accompanying Anna on her way towards the accomplishment of that goal throughout her training as a concert pianist is an inspiring, fascinating and accessible read for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Monday, October 10, 2011

“How can we get our students to practice?” was the topic of last Sunday’s teachers forum of the Leschetizky Association.

To start with, there are the organizational issues: actually making the time to sit down at the piano, and practice in an environment that is quiet and fosters concentrated work. Setting aside a specific time for practicing each day can be helpful. Parental support can be crucial, at least as far as keeping the time is concerned. Regarding the parents‘ active participation in the practice process, there were mixed reactions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. One of the teachers even reported that that he had a very good experience helping one of his children to practice; with the other child, it didn’t work at all. A lot seems to depend on the personalities, and the “chemistry” between them.

As teachers we can make suggestions to parents and students, but ultimately, the setting at home is beyond our command. One thing we can do is teach how to practice. We talked about our own childhood experiences, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one who had to grow up to be an adult in order to find out that she didn’t have a clue how to practice. I played through my pieces from beginning to end, I repeated sections that didn’t work, they got a little better, but I had no clue what focus was, or how to observe and find out what caused the mistake.

Every time you repeat something that is not correct, you “download” wrong information. The brain learns through repetition, and you find yourself reinforcing something that you don’t want. Ultimately, you’ll have to “unlearn” it, and that requires much more effort than pushing the “delete” button on the computer. On the other hand, it is impossible to learn without making mistakes, and all practicing includes a certain amount of “trial and error” until you find the solution to the problem.

The first step is isolate the trouble spot and identify the problem. The length of the practice section is determined by what the brain can handle. You can mark the section in the score; draw a “practice bubble” around it; or put up “barriers” with sticky notes. Next, you have to break it up into small steps that can be done. You can play the fingerings in the air or on the fall board and play the hands alone. Most of the time, you have to reduce the tempo. Young people often find that difficult, it’s just not the mode they’re running on. “Everything in my life is fast,” a student told me once, when I asked him to imagine the atmosphere of a quiet evening.

Playing slowly can be compared to a movie in slow motion, or listening to the music through an “acoustic microscope.” Playing fast means to test the results, and you need to lay the foundation first through playing at a slow or moderate tempo, that allows you to control what you do. Ultimately, it’s control that you’re aiming for, at any tempo.

Students need means to monitor what they are doing while they practice. It’s good to keep an assignment book that lists not only the pieces to be practiced, but the tasks that need to be done. Notes can be taken during the lesson, as long as it doesn’t take too much time; it also turns out that too detailed instructions tend not to be read. It can be helpful to record a lesson or parts of it, for further reference at home.

There are practice games that support awareness. One teacher introduced us to the “no mistake” approach: the student needs to play from point A to point B without making the mistake (whether it is a note mistake, fingering, rhythmic or even something technical). If the mistake is made, the student must return to point A and try again. Similar to that is the “three items” game: you take three items, (pencils, paper clips, pennies...) and every time you play the section correctly, you move one over to the other side of the music stand. If you make a mistake, one item has to go back, and you can’t move on to the next section until all three items are on the other side.

Transposition can be a good exercise, especially for “fast and reckless” players.

Repetitions need to be mindful, not mechanical. There is only so much you can achieve in one practice session, and it’s important to take breaks when you realize that you’re getting tired. You can’t improve if you don’t listen to what you’re doing, and you need to keep up emotional involvement and overall motivation. Recording can be helpful. Some kids like to record their pieces over time, and eventually put them together on a CD, which makes a very personal present and a testimony of their accomplishment at the same time.

Improvisation is a good way to tune in at the beginning of the lesson. “Pattern Play” by Akiko and Forrest Kinney presents good ideas; some of them can already be used in teaching pre school children. Students enjoy ear training games at the lesson: with one person at the piano, and one person listening, you start on C, then you move up or down from there, using different intervals, and the person who’s listening names the notes. You can also write them down, using manuscript paper, or give the student a “mystery song”. You specify the hand position on the keyboard and only write down the finger numbers; or you give the starting point and name the intervals, and the student has to figure out the song.

Our discussion ended on a topic we had talked about at an earlier meeting: There has to be music at every lesson. You have to teach practicing, but you also have to show how it connects to the music. Kids have to hear themselves play something beautiful. They have to experience that something grows out of those small practice steps. The small steps ultimately lead to something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Whatever is learnt in music transfers to other areas of life and learning. Art isn’t entertainment, it is the individual shaping his environment. It is based on intuition, and it is at the core of human intelligence. Childhood is a “window of opportunity” to initiate the connection with art. If we as teachers succeed in bringing this message across to the students an parents, it is the strongest argument for continuing lessons, even in times of tight schedules and budgets.

(The Teachers' Forum of the Leschetizky Association is open to all piano teachers. Membership is not required, admission is free. For further information, please visit the website.)